Congress

Are lawmakers in the 116th Congress again preparing to pick winners and losers in the commercial transportation industry?

Under former President Barack Obama, the Department of Transportation capitulated to the demands on union workers and issued a notice of proposed rulemaking to require all freight rail operations to have at least two members aboard. Fortunately, this rule never went into effect.

In an effort to fight climate change, freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) introduced this week a framework they call a "Green New Deal.” Saying that this plan is overly ambitious is an understatement.

President Nixon’s secretary of agriculture, Earl Butz, once said in 1973, “get big or get out.” He enthusiastically urged farmers to buy up their neighbors’ land. Since then, American agriculture policy has enabled big industrialized farm businesses to triumph over smaller family farms. Big businesses usually receive larger subsidies, so the most powerful farming operations are rewarded.

As people eat their leftover Halloween candy, they may want to think about how much they paid for all those treats. Raw sugar in the United States regularly costs double or triple the world average, and this hurts food companies and leads to high prices for consumers at the grocery store.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), the tax bill passed in Congress last year, represents the most substantial change to the nation’s tax code in a generation. This change has greatly benefited the U.S. economy as American businesses have become more competitive globally while American workers have seen an increase in their wages.

Publicly-funded broadband overbuild is an ongoing problem across the country. It is far easier to deploy new services alongside existing infrastructure than to build-out to those who remain in unserved areas.

The federal government will soon dole out around $12 billion in "temporary relief" to farmers adversly affected by President Trump's tariffs and trade war, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced on Tuesday. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue told reporters that amount was "in line" with the estimated impact from retaliatory tariffs on U.S. agriculture exports.

The aid will be awarded to cotton, corn, dairy, hog, and soybean farmers as well as possibly others. It is scheduled to go into effect on Labor Day.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has said that the country has ample power to supply market needs. FERC intervened and stopped an attempt by the Department of Energy (DOE) to pick winners and losers in the energy market when it unanimously rejected DOE’s proposal to bailout nuclear and coal.